On fire
Hunan food is famous throughout China, coated as it is in layers of sizzling red peppers, which turn even eggplant into edible flames. People here are astounded that I can chow such spicy grub. I tell them that I have stomachs to feed, and the hot stuff is all that's on offer. Plus, it's a form of exercise -- I sweat as though I've just run the mile after eating a plate of cabbage.
Most weeknights, around 10:30 p.m., Manabu and I head to the "restaurant row," a street just outside campus lined with brick shack restaurants, with sloped corrugated steel roofs, dirt floors and husband-and-wife teams cooking in front of them. This campus, thankfully, is too far from civilization to have been colonized by chain restaurants or sanitized by health inspectors.
The narrow street is a glutton's paradise. From pre-dawn to post-dusk, an enormous variety of food is available -- name your vegetable, name your meat, name your fish. The food comes from the farm fields and small river tributaries that surround the university, and it's displayed in neat lines. Red bell peppers on a stick are next to cilantro on a stick are next to chicken drums on a stick are next to fish heads on a stick are next to eggplant on a stick are next to bananas on a stick are next to octopi on a stick. Visually, it's sublime. Ogling is the first step.
Then, you order. Some outfits grill your food, cutting little trenches into it, applying oil with a paintbrush and coating it in la jiao (red cayenne pepper). Others fry it in vats of boiling black oil, which can't be quite healthy, taking it out after a few minutes and, of course, submerging it in a bowl of la jiao and sprinkling it with another concoction of spices. Others stir-fry; some cook on a stove-top.
On Monday night, Manabu and I undertook our usual pilgrimmage, made our usual fumbling attempts at ordering in Chinese -- the vendors depend on us for their night's entertainment -- and devoured the night's treats with our usual glee. Manabu got his standard grilled beef on a stick and grilled potatoes on a stick; I ordered deep fried cilantro-, cabbage-, banana- and mushroom-on-a-stick. Then, we both ate a bowl of fried rice.
Immediately upon eating my fare, my stomach voiced its displeasure. Often, my mouth smiles at la jiao while my stomach grimaces, but the fire's usually put out quickly enough, no harm done. On Monday night, however, the food seemed even fierier than usual, and from the first swallow, I could tell something wasn't right. I went to sleep a few hours later with an upset stomach; I awoke Tuesday morning, at 5:24, with an irate stomach. Soon last night's treats became this morning's projectiles, and the loo became my home.
Once I was emptied, completely, a crippling bout of extreme lethargy, compounded by a gnarly headache, took hold of me and rendered me useless for Tuesday and Wednesday. It couldn't be worse timing, as all my nine classes occur on those two days. I canceled all of them. Bummer.
When sick and far away from home, it's easy to feel lonelier than usual, to lament your fate and to miss your mother. I'm allowed no such self-pity. Within minutes of my first call to a student, asking her to inform the others that class was off today, my home became a switchboard. Cell phone rings competed with normal-phone rings competed with doorbell rings as seemingly every freshman English major rushed to my bedside, either in person or in voice, to express sorrow and admonish me to please, please, "have a rest." I couldn't agree more -- all I had the energy to do was lie on my bed and shut my eyes. Even reading was too much work.
Except that rest was hardly possible, given the steady parade of phone calls and visits. One group of students, leaving a dozen oranges, was hardly out the door before the next group arrived, bestowing upon me four cucumbers, which "cool your body and make you better," who were gone five minutes before the next crew arrived with a bowl of bitter-melon soup.
Meanwhile, messages of support were flooding my email Inbox, my cell-out phone was getting confused, as it could hardly keep track of when to vibrate, for a new text message of support, and when to ring, for a new live message of support, and my actual phone's ringer was getting hoarse from overuse. I felt like Ferris Bueller, except that I actually
was sick. Class seemed like a breeze compared to this, and I actually considered retracting my offer to cancel class.
In China, even more so than in America, people cannot resist the urge to be my mother. On every holiday of any significance, I am inundated with messages and cards and presents from my students. Every time the weather is going to turn for the worse, a student will call and remind me to dress appropriately. Whenever I travel, my students will accompany me to the train station and actually offer to go with me wherever I'm going, even when it's Shanghai or Beijing. When I tell them it's not necessary, they'll write out, in Chinese, every conceivable phrase I might need to use to a hotel clerk or a cab driver. They cook meals for me. They offer to do my laundry. They pay the bill when we go out to eat.
All of these gestures are deeply touching and point to the immense reverence the Chinese hold both for foreigners and for teachers. I happen to fit both categories, and so I'm twice blessed by their extreme kindness which, like la jiao, can be so intense at times as to seem almost smothering. For both things, though, I can only be thankful -- the Hunan la jiao that fires up my blood and the Hunan people's kindness that warms my soul.
